Modern conflicts between efficiently organized nations tend to obtain just this character.  They are fought for a defensible purpose, and they accomplish a definite result.  The penalties of defeat are so disastrous that warfare is no longer wantonly incurred; and it will not be provoked at all by nations, such as Italy or France, who have less to gain from victory than they have to lose from defeat.  Moreover, the cost of existing armaments is so crushing that an ever increasing motive exists in favor of their ultimate reduction.  This motive will not operate as long as the leading Powers continue to have unsatisfied ambitions which look practicable; but eventually it will necessarily have its effect.  Each war, as it occurs, even if it does not finally settle some conflicting claims, will most assuredly help to teach the warring nations just how far they can go, and will help, consequently, to restrict its subsequent policy within practicable and probably inoffensive limits.  It is by no means an accident that England and France, the two oldest European nations, are the two whose foreign policies are best defined and, so far as Europe is concerned, least offensive.  For centuries these Powers fought and fought, because one of them had aggressive designs which apparently or really affected the welfare of the other; but the result of this prolonged rivalry has been a constantly clearer understanding of their respective national interests.  Clear-headed and moderate statesmen like Talleyrand recognized immediately after the Revolution that the substantial interests of a liberalized France in Europe were closely akin to those of Great Britain, and again and again in the nineteenth century this prophecy was justified.  Again and again the two Powers were brought together by their interests only to be again divided by a tradition of antagonism and misunderstanding.  At present, however, they are probably on better terms than ever before in the history of their relations; and this result is due to the definite and necessarily unaggressive character of their European interests.  They have finally learned the limits of their possible achievement and could transgress them only by some act of folly.

In the course of another fifty years the limits of possible aggression by Germany and Russia in Europe will probably be very much better defined than they are to-day.  These two Powers will seek at the favorable moment to accomplish certain aggressive purposes which they secretly or openly entertain, and they will succeed or fail.  Each success or failure will probably be decisive in certain respects, and will remove one or more existing conflicts of interest or ambiguities of position.  Whether this progressive specification of the practicable foreign policies of the several Powers will soon or will ever go so far as to make some general international understanding possible, is a question which no man can answer; but as long as the national principle retains its vitality,